Russia

Stalin’s forced deportation of educated ‘enemies of the people’ inadvertently concentrated human capital in Gulag towns, fostering inter-generational prosperity and long-term development despite the destructive intent of the repression.

The 1933 Soviet famine was not the inevitable result of poor harvests but of Stalin’s collectivisation and procurement policies, which disproportionately targeted Ukrainians and produced catastrophic, unequal mortality.

Unlike Western Europe, Russia entrenched serfdom as an extractive institution rooted in frontier defence. To secure its southern border, the state granted land to servicemen who leveraged their strategic role to restrict peasant mobility—hardwiring c...

How does the productivity of individual bureaucrats affect the overall efficiency of the public sector?

Evidence from Russia shows that through appropriate policy design, policymakers can overcome existing capacity challenges within bureaucracies